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Title : Part 2 Read 1 below first
Author : George Magazine
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EDITOR'S REVELATION: In Part 1 of our interview with UFO sleuth/computer
conferencing pioneer Jacques Vallee, we looked at some of the scientific
evidence bolstering the contention that UFOs are a real, measurable
phenomenon. In Part 2, below, Vallee continues this theme as he talks about
his samples of "liquid sky"--the metallic debris occasionally seen ejected
from flying disks.
Then hold on to your propeller beanie as we depart four-dimensional time
space and look at some of Vallee's more exotic theories about the origin of
UFOs. As Vallee puts it, "The UFO phenomenon exists. It has been with us
throughout history. It is physical in nature and it remains unexplained in
terms of contemporary science. It represents a level of consciousness that we
have not yet recognized, and which is able to manipulate dimensions beyond
time and space as we understand them. It affects our own consciousness in
ways that we do not grasp fully, and it generally behaves as a control
system."

Vallee refers to this complex system of control--which is shaping human
society over the course of thousands of years--as an "interface of reality
with consciousness." It sounds a lot like Arthur C. Clarke's science
fictional theme in 2001: A Space Odyssey--an alien intelligence subtly
directing the course of human development, toward mysterious ends. Talk about
your cosmic conspiracies!

But Vallee also has controversial ideas about human-made UFO conspiracies. "I
was investigating some cases that were physically real," he says, "but they
were hoaxes--yet not hoaxes on the part of the witnesses."

The two most stunning cases of faked UFO events that Vallee has uncovered
occurred rather recently in the history of saucer sightings. In 1980, a
strange object purportedly "crashed" in England's Rendlesham Forest, a few
miles away from an American Air Force Base. Dozens of military personnel were
dispatched into the forest, without weapons, before the supposed crash of a
luminous object. After the incident conflicting stories leaked to the press
and to civilian investigators, some of the leaks apparently originating from
the front office of the military base. Vallee's conclusion--controversial
among UFO believers who insist that aliens touched down in Rendlesham
Forest--is that "the event had all the earmarks of being staged for the
benefit of the witnesses, perhaps so that their psychological reactions could
be studied."

Even more bizarre is the information turned up by French investigators in the
wake of a bizarre 1979 abduction case. An unemployed young man named Franck
Fontaine disappeared outside of his apartment one morning, reportedly after
his friends saw him enveloped in a luminous fog. After a week of frenzied
press coverage and a fruitless search by the authorities, Fontaine turned up
in a field outside the apartment--with no memory of his unusual experience.
His friends insisted he had been abducted by a UFO, and police investigators,
though they doubted that claim, found no other satisfactory explanation.

But as Vallee reports, investigators from GEPAN, the French government's
aerial phenomena study group, were led to an official in the French Ministry
of Defense who willingly described the so-called UFO abduction as an
"Exercise of General Synthesis." What happened to Fontaine? "We put him to
sleep and he was put under an altered state of high suggestibility," replied
the official. When asked if the "exercise" was intended to test the
investigative abilities of local law enforcement agencies, the official said,
"That would be a fair way to describe it." Then he added, ominously, "If this
operation had been completed, the next phase would have been far worse." As
Vallee notes in his best-selling book, Revelations, "It would be fair to
assume that the [Fontaine] operation could have been a test, perhaps a
prelude to an experiment of wider scope."

Vallee says he knows the name of the French official, an Air Force officer,
who spoke on condition of anonymity.

So what on earth--to pick an appropriate planet--is going on? Vallee has
several theories that might explain such UFO flimflam. The military may be
experimenting with psychological warfare techniques, as the Germans did in
World War I, when they projected images of the Virgin Mary on banks of smoke
in an effort to spook the French into saying their Rosaries instead of
killing Germans. Vallee also thinks that sham UFO reports might be used as
cover for tests of new military stealth technology.

But the most troubling "deception theory" Vallee poses is that from time to
time, the target of UFO hoaxes might be the general public, or a segment
thereof.

"In some cases," he says, "the community of ufologists may simply be used in
a sociological experiment because they are a convenient group of people to
test, to see how they react to different rumors."

Sounds a bit improbable, but Vallee's research into the growth of UFO
"contactee" cults is suggests that such manipulation occurs. In his book,
Messengers of Deception, Vallee explored the rise of a new kind of religious
movement throughout the world: the UFO Messiah cults, in which believers
await the coming of bubble-headed saviors in saucers. You can find these
groups in Europe and the Americas, in increasing numbers. Want a glimpse of
this otherworldly subculture? Just buzz into any of the alt.alien Usenet
groups or enter the magic word "UFO" into any World Wide Web search engine
and see how fast you're channeled into one of the most heavily trodden
alternate dimensions of online obsession since Big Brother went digital.

Listen to "Seth," the channeled alien being from beyond; hear the Venusian
commander known as Val Thor, who parks his spaceship on Lake Mead near Las
Vegas as if it were an extraterrestrial houseboat (when he's not advising the
Pentagon); heed the warnings of the well-heeled "Rael," who speaks through a
French contactee and runs a worldwide organization.

According to Vallee, the French press has recently reported that the
notorious Order of the Solar Temple--in the news last year after 53 members
committed suicide in Switzerland and Canada--told its followers that the
highest levels of initiation involved meetings with extraterrestrial beings.
The cult used holographic projectors purchased in the United States to fool
its members. "As you may recall," says Vallee, "members of the cult were
educated people and professionals--not crazy kids on drugs."

So without further ado, we present Part 2 of the Jacques Vallee interview:

Liquid Sky

60GCAT: Let's talk about some of the other forms of hard evidence that
scientists can look at when studying the UFO problem. For instance, chunks of
molten metal, the so-called "liquid sky" samples.
Vallee: On their own, these metal samples are not compelling evidence. But
the existence of this material does show that there is data that scientists
can look at. When we received the Bogota, Columbia, sample [supposedly the
remnants of a plume of liquid slag ejected from a flying disk over the
University of Bogota in the mid-1970s] we sawed off one little corner for
analysis. It turned out to be mostly aluminum. Again, this doesn't prove
anything: you could make a hunk of this stuff in your backyard by pouring
molten metal into a pool of water. Metallurgically, the Bogota sample is not
that unusual--except that it has gone through a violent heating, not just up
to a boiling point, but beyond. My point has always been that it is
interesting to see what patterns emerge from analysis of enough of these
samples. If you kept picking up specimens like that, it might move your
research into a particular direction.

60GCAT: One theory is that this liquid metal is part of the UFOs' propulsion
system.

Vallee: There are [man-made] motors that use liquid metal--usually
mercury--for liquid contact. But the temperatures necessary for molten
aluminum and other metals would have to be quite extreme.

60GCAT: What about liquid sky samples that are of a slightly more exotic
makeup than the aluminum slag?

Vallee: The only one that's unusual is the one that Prof. Peter Sturrock (a
plasma physicist at Stanford University) has. It comes from Ubatuba, Brazil.
In the early 1930s, an object exploded over a beach in Ubatuba. [In 1957, an
alleged fragment from the explosion turned up; its precise origin is
uncertain.] Subsequent analysis at the University and Colorado and Stanford
confirmed that the material was magnesium and magnesium oxide, with a very
minute amount of impurities. If the metal really did originate in the 1930s,
it would be very unusual because given the technology of the day, someone
would have had to go to a lot of trouble to get it that pure.

The Cosmic Database

60GCAT: Let's talk about some of the implications of your research. If the
UFO phenomenon is real, but is not aliens from outer space, we're talking
about new ways of thinking about reality and cosmology, aren't we?
Vallee: Yes. In that sense, phenomenon is much more important than visitors
from another planet would be. Because it fundamentally challenges the nature
of reality. If UFOs are a physical reality, they certainly violate everything
we think we know about reality. There are reliable reports of material UFOs
that become immaterial and disappear on the spot.

60GCAT: Your theories about UFOs and other "paranormal" phenomena involve
your metaphor of the "informational universe," where time and space and
whatever other dimensions there might be act as a kind of cosmic computer
database. What do you mean by that?

Vallee: You can get a consistent representation of reality if you look at the
world as a collection of events, or 'instances' (as the philosophy of
Occasionalism did in the eleventh century), rather than as a collection of
material objects moving in 3-dimensional space as time flows. In virtual
reality, of course, you can't tell the difference. In the real world
information and energy are actually the same physical quantity. In a universe
viewed as 'informational events' you should expect coincidences, telepathy,
time travel, multiple realities--all those things that seem impossible in the
4-D energy universe. To me that's why puzzles like UFOs are interesting. I
don't have a personal theory to "explain" them, but I see them as an
opportunity to pose new questions. If it's true that information resides in
the questions we ask, coming up with novel problems may be more important
than having answers, at this stage of our very limited understanding of the
universe.

60GCAT: So reality is like a computer database in that the right search word
or "incantation" might cause a piece of information--a UFO or ghost or other
anomaly--to materialize.

Vallee: If you think of [reality] as the software for the universe, all it
would take is for someone to change a comma in the program and the chair you
are sitting in wouldn't be a chair at all. The major benefit from this model
is that it handles anomalies very well. Coincidences would be a normal
expectation. If you address a database with a request for anything with the
word "pool" you will get ads for sunscreen, lotions, billiard balls and an
investment prospectus or two. In parapsychology gifted subjects may be
forcing similar coincidences between separate locations or separate minds.
One way of testing the theory, by the way, is to create massive informational
anomalies and see what happens when they collapse. You could enhance remote
viewing experiments, for instance, by loading the site with large quantities
of data about highly unlikely events or situations, then quickly erase that
data to collapse the singularity.

60GCAT: Of course, now we're talking about the intersection of science and
mysticism. Do you consider yourself a mystical person?

Vallee: I have never been comfortable with an arbitrary separation of the
world into the physical universe (which is presumably what science studies)
and the psychological, social and psychic side of life. To me that arbitrary
separation is the major weakness of our intellectual system.

Most scientists who decide to study astronomy at an early age, as I did, are
probably motivated by something akin to a mystical desire to understand the
night sky and to embrace the larger issues. As time goes on, of course, that
desire gets eroded and trivialized. In my case I managed to keep that
curiosity fresh because although I haven't had a "mystical" experience in a
religious sense, I have always suspected that there was another level of
consciousness and that it was accessible to the human mind. I have found
similar feelings among many Net programmers, who were drawn to networking by
the impression of operating outside the normal constraints of time and space,
something akin to what mystics describe, although of course much more mundane.

The Controllers

60GCAT: You've said that UFOs represent a form of alien intelligence that is
actively manipulating human society. How and toward what end?
Vallee: A new computer analysis of historical trends, compiled in the 1970s,
led me to plot a striking graph of "waves" of UFO activity that was anything
but periodic. Fred Beckman and Dr. Price Williams of UCLA pointed out that it
resembled a schedule of reinforcement typical of a learning or training
process: the phenomenon was more akin to a control system than to an
exploratory task force of alien travelers. There are many control systems
around us, and some are a part of nature: ecology, climate, etc. Some are
man-made: the process of education, the thermostat in your home. If the UFO
phenomenon represents a control system, can we test it to determine if it is
natural or artificial, open or closed? This is one of the interesting
questions about the phenomenon that has never been answered.

Chariots of the Frauds

60GCAT: Speaking of control systems, some of your other avenues of UFO
research have led you to suggest that from time to time human
agencies--governments, cults, and other groups interested in manipulating
people's beliefs--have engineered UFO deceptions and hoaxes. Now we're really
getting conspiratorial. . . .
Vallee: I think the place where ufology--the way it has developed
today--meets with my interest in communications, and my interest in networks
is in deception and manipulation. I think that is an area of which people
should be aware. Because I think a lot of the things that are being discussed
today, among people who believe in UFOs, are either mythical or a part of
manipulation of some sort, which could include the stories of little aliens
and the hybrids and abductions and so forth. A lot of that may be either
material that cults have injected into the culture because it suits their own
fantasy about the end of the world or the millennium and all that.

Or, in a more sinister sense, in some of the cases I've investigated, the
deception hides a mind-control experiment. Anybody who is aware of technology
today should know that we have much more than a stealth fighter flying
around. We have capabilities, theoretical or practical, to make all types of
things. There is a massive development of nonlethal platforms going on that
those platforms have to be tested somewhere, they have to be disguised as
something else from time to time. There has been massive development of
RPVs--remotely piloted vehicles--some of which are disk-shaped. There is
massive development of low observable technologies that are used for
reconnaissance and can be used for all sorts of other things. And in many
cases, the UFO stories are not simply fantasies in the minds of a few
witnesses, but may have been planted as part of a cover for some very
terrestrial technologies that we are developing.

'Messengers of Deception?'

60GCAT: The UMMO cult, which you discuss at length in your books, Revelations
and Messengers of Deception, has an impressive history of elaborate
deception. Tell us about it.
Vallee: I think that the UMMO myth was started by a small group of people,
essentially cultists. What was intriguing about UMMO was all its
pseudo-scientific revelations [supposedly handed down to earthling scientists
like Vallee from UMMO-ites, beings who hail from a planet 14.6 light years
away from our sun]. But these supposed revelations were not within the state
of the art. They didn't come up with proof of Fermat's theorem or something
like that, it was just perfectly good science fiction.

60GCAT: What about the French theory that UMMO was a psychological experiment?

Vallee: Yeah, they thought that the cult had been used or was manipulated by
the KGB. Because for one thing, some of their ideas--some of the data that
was supposedly channeled from the UMMO organization in the sky was very
advanced cosmology. Very advanced cosmology about twin universes involving
some data that was not stupid--it came straight out of the notes of Andre
Sakarav, including some of the unpublished notes of Sakarav, some things that
Sakarav was known to have worked on, but had not published. And so some
people--and I don't know who's right--felt that somebody had to have access
to those notes, to inspire those messages, perhaps the KGB. It wasn't just
ordinary science fiction; it was somebody who knew what some of the more
advanced cosmologists were thinking.

60GCAT: Why would the KGB or any intelligence agency perpetrate such an
arcane hoax?

Vallee: Well, let me tell you a little story. About fifteen years ago there
was a group that suddenly appeared in San Francisco. They had a big party
downtown. And they invited everybody who was anybody in parapsychology. And
they made a little speech saying, "We have all this money from somebody who
wants to do good and help research, we know that there isn't much money in
parapsychology; we will entertain proposals for research, give us your best
ideas; we will send it to a panel who will review it and we will fund the
best research." After the party, a lot of people rushed home to their
computers and typed in all their best ideas, sent it on--but the organization
never existed, was never heard from again. Somebody was fishing.

So having a cover as a group sometimes, a completely weird group, can be a
convenient way of getting technical intelligence. It's a good way of doing
technological assessment. So some of those weird groups could be used for
that. Now, that doesn't explain why they would do it for ten years. In the
case of UMMO, why would you go on? I think that UMMO became sort of a goal in
itself. It became self-propagating. because so many people got drawn to it,
psychologically. They started writing things about each other and it became a
self-sustaining myth. They're still sending me stuff. There is an index,
catalogs; for some people it's become their entire life. Increasingly, we're
seeing those kinds of cults appearing in net space, cyberspace.

60GCAT: Is there something about online communications that helps foster
myths and deceptions?
Vallee: Because we live in a world where with communications media based on
digital networks, a small group of people can have a tremendous impact on the
belief of the masses. And we also live in a world where the belief of the
masses is a strategic weapon. We have H-bombs but we can't use them. We have
neutron bombs, but we can't use them. But if we found a way of influencing
the beliefs of masses of people, that would have great strategic impact. The
big problems in the world are the problems of fundamentalism and
religion--whether it's Islamic or in other forms of religion. Those are the
great destabilizing forces in the world today. Well, belief in
Extraterrestrials coming here to save us can be induced in large masses of
people with the technical means that exist today.

The potential for contagion of absurd beliefs is a real one. In the hands of
people who might deliberately use the Internet to create an epidemic of
irrationalism we might see the emergence of a whole new class of very
dangerous, powerful cults with all the trappings of high technology.

And I think somebody has to pay attention to that angle. So I was led to that
by finding-- I was investigating some cases that were physically real, but
were hoaxes--but not hoaxes on the part of the witnesses. And the story about
the object had in fact been planted.

The Bentwaters case [in which American servicemen at an Air Force base in
England observed a disk-shaped craft land in the forest] is a classic. At the
landing site, they had a mix of ordinary guards, officers, sentries and so
on--they all had orders to go to the site under a scenario. And that's not
what would of happened if the encounter were real--if a strange object landed
on the base you wouldn't be sending out a hundred people without weapons. The
thing has all the earmarks of being staged for the benefit of the witnesses,
so that they could be studied and the reactions of the different
psychological types and of different ranks could be studied. And when you
think about it, it's not that weird. If you were in charge of a project like
that, you'd have to test it in conditions where nobody is danger and you can
get the data you need. In cases like this one--not many but a few of
them--that I investigated, I had to conclude that these were tests of virtual
reality projectors.

Psy-Ops from 'Beyond'

60GCAT: So there might be military applications for this technology of
deception?
Vallee: Our gods have always come from the sky. And how would a god come from
the sky today? He would come down in some kind of space ship. He couldn't
just appear out of the clouds, I mean, that won't work. Although in World War
I the Germans were using psychological warfare by projecting photographs,
slides, along French lines. And I'm sure the French were doing the same thing
to the Germans. And there are very sophisticated devices now being used in
psychological warfare to create holograms, to create visions to influence
people. It might not work with you and me today if we go out today and see
something in the skies, it might not destabilize us. But if we were under a
lot of stress--if you've been fighting for a month on some little island, and
all of the sudden something like that happens--

I remember seeing a letter to the U.S. Air Force from a man who was finally
reporting something he had seen during World War II in the Pacific. He said
he was on top of a little island lookout point. They were expecting a
Japanese attack. They had been fighting intensely on and off for several
weeks. They were fairly isolated. They saw an object in the sky that was
absolutely physical, that circled the island, was a disk, no means of
propulsion, no noise. It circled the island and went off. And he said he had
never reported it, not even to his wife. The reason he didn't report it at
the time was that his men were under such stress that he wouldn't want them
to think that their commander might be flipping. So the same kind of
psychological means that won't work with ordinary people and ordinary things
might work in exceptional cases.

60GCAT: And therefore cultists and UFO true believers--who are under a kind
of ideological stress--might be seen as ideal targets for such manipulation.

Vallee: In some cases the UFO community may be simply used in a sociological
experiment because they are a convenient group of people to see how they
would react to different rumors. [Suppose the government loses a nuclear
weapon over a foreign country.] You still have to go and recover that thing.
And you can't tell people what you're doing, so you have to be able to very
quickly plant a story. You might plant a story that this was a flying saucer
from Venus. That would be so ridiculous that scientists wouldn't go check.
You might have a few journalists there, but you can tell them whatever you
want, and you can give them photographs of whatever. And so all you need is
to distract everybody for two or three days, time to bring the equipment, get
everything out, recover whatever was scattered and go away. I think there are
cases where exactly that has happened. And those are sort of the great UFO
stories that people still tell around campfire.

But I think there was no UFO there. I think the UFO story was invented-- I
was saying earlier it's healthy to be skeptical. I respect people who have a
skeptical argument there. Jim Oberg, who is a specialist in the Russian space
program, pointed out to me that some of the sightings that I published from
the Soviet Union--a strange yellowish crescent seen going through the sky by
many people in the Soviet Union--that those were rocket tests that were
illegal under the Salt agreement; and obviously, they couldn't hide it in the
sky. . . so the government planted the story that there was a flying saucer,
and that got into the newspapers.

Again, the UFO research community is a useful laboratory in which to observe
the effects of propaganda and disinformation, since it is driven in large
part by an intent to expose "the coverup." This creates an opportunity for
people to masquerade as good guys and "reveal" all sorts of unverifiable
rumors. They meet with a receptive audience because the context is one of
"independent inquiry of original, bold, nonconformist ideas. Does that mean
we should necessarily believe the man who claims he was in NATO intelligence
and saw a classified document about the four humanoid races that live on the
moon? I don't think so.